Fall home improvement time all over the place

I should explain. We are just winding up of one of those simple little “home improvement projects” right now. Seems like we have been doing one every spring and fall for the past 46 years.

I told Jack that if we ever got completely done with the house, it would probably only be because we had it up for sale…

And every time we have started – and finished a project, we have sworn that it was absolutely the very last time and we would never, ever do it again. Then a few months later, guess what? We are at it again.

Being a part of a (mostly) happily married couple, I could blame it all on Jack, but then to be truthful, I am the one who dreams these little “projects” up most of the time. I really have to take most of the blame.

And Jack, bless his heart, goes right along with it, only grumbling a little bit, even though just a little while ago, he may have sworn we would have to hire someone to do it the next time.

Anyway, we are replacing some yucky old hallway carpet with some vinyl that looks like cherry. It’s a new product, looks beautiful and It’s certainly not hard to do, except for two old codgers like us who need a helper to get back up once we kneel down.

And believe me, we have been kneeling down quite a bit – hence the second sentence above. These projects, I have to admit, are getting harder and harder to do as the years go by. The first time we remodeled a house, we both worked full time, came home, ate supper and worked on the house every night until 10 p.m. – with kids underfoot! Of course we were in our 20s then…

These days, we work for an hour then we have to have a “break” for half an hour and we can’t do much unless we have the whole day off to do it in.

Back to our current project. Our projects all start out to be simple little improvements that should be easy to do and not take much time at all – right. It always turns out to be more complicated than we bargained for.

Of course, replacing the flooring means we are also replacing the trim, which all had to be removed before we put down the floor. And replacing the trim means painting it all ahead of time and cutting and fitting and cursing when it didn’t quite fit, and cutting it again and….well anyone who is married to a guy who likes to “fix it” knows what I am talking about here.

We have added on to three of the four houses we have lived in four different times now and remodeled and redecorated more times than I can count.

We have painted and drywalled and plastered and patched and wallpapered. We have experimented, sometimes successfully with new ideas like the design for the wood ceiling in our living room, and sometimes not so successfully like the time we put in plastic trim – big mistake. We have installed walkways outside, built two decks; the last one a deck around two sides of the house, and even built a playhouse in the backyard for our granddaughters.

Now the current project is done, except the doors look kinda dingy next to the new trim and could use a coat of paint, and the carpet in our bedroom looks pretty yucky too and I think we will be putting more flooring in there next and of course if we do that we will need to replace all of that trim….

Any more “home improvement projects” will have to wait until spring now. Next Tuesday, Jack is scheduled for the first of two hip replacement surgeries.

And he says he still has a few little projects of his own to get done first…